Monsters or Guides? Tuning into your Inner Landscape

Seeing Yetis and other monsters...
The image of Yetis and dinosaurs came to me in response to a page in the 1950's science textbook that I have been working into. The process is to find new imagery, using the pages of the book as inspiration. At times, I work into the pages first with more abstract “background” imagery and use that for inspiration.  This page had dinosaurs in a prehistoric landscape. 
 
Anyway, when I started to work into these pages I saw these Yeti-like creatures and it occurred to me to wonder, what if Yetis were real and dinosaurs were not? In this image, one of the Yetis seems to be grabbing at a girl or perhaps a woman, who is dressed in a green fuzzy suit. The woman doesn't look too worried about this. Perhaps she knows that even though the Yeti looks scary, he isn't really going to do her any harm. That year, I kept hearing about Yetis, in a doll that a participant in one of my on-line workshops made, in a story I saw on the internet. What was this about? I was being visited by monsters but also being asked to question whether or not they were really monsters. In the stories of others, the Yeti was also a helpful rather than scary soul. 
 
Noises in the Night, Dangers on the Street...
I am and probably have always been interested in this topic of whether scary things were really dangerous or not, from when I was a small child and imagined that noises in the night outside our New York City apartment meant that danger was coming. This was in the 1960's upper West Side of Manhattan and truly, it wasn't the safest time to be in the city. We saw real scary things and did have to be careful. My mother tells a story of when she was at the playground at the end of our street on Morningside Drive. I was probably 4. My next youngest sister was almost 3 and my mother was very pregnant with my youngest sister. She saw a man trying to break into a car just up the road from the deserted playground where we were standing. Not thinking this through very clearly and filled with that material fierce energy that we all hear about, my mother ran up to the man (probably dragging me behind her by the hand and pushing my sister in the stroller) and she yelled at him, "Get away from that car!" And he did run away. It was only later that she realized what danger she might have been in.  I don’t think at the time there would have been much conversation about experiences such as this, and so as a small child I worried at night.  

Me and mom from around the time of that story. This was a different park from the Morningside Park that I describe in the above story. This was Riverside Park, I think. And I was a bit younger in this photo.

​A visit with the Morrigan, ancient Celtic crone “monster”
Last year I did a guided visualization in which the Morrigan appeared. The Morrigan, briefly, is a Celtic crone who has a very fierce aspect and was at times associated with warriors and wartime, and death. In this vision I did not recognize her as the Morrigan.  I only found out later from a tarot reader who saw a dark fierce figure in my reading and I mentioned my earlier vision.  The next day, I got an email from the tarot reader saying she had heard what sounded like “Maura, Morri…something.” She wasn’t familiar with the Morrigan but had looked her up and discovered that the word she had been hearing was “Morrigan.” 

Taking care of "dirty jobs"
In my vision, the Morrigan appeared over the edge of a mountain path, along a stream where I was standing at the top. First I saw her headdress of what seemed like a huge bunch of sticks, then large iridescent, blue/ black wings. I couldn’t look at her face when it appeared, except to tell that she had a bird-like appearance. I started to cry and looked at her feet, since I couldn’t bear to look into her eyes. Her feet were also birdlike with three toes, very big, strong and solid. I sensed her connection to the sky and to the earth, perhaps drawing both energies together. And that she had the potential to destroy, to tear trees out by the roots with one hand and at the same time, the potential to heal, with the touch of her hand. She had several messages for me, one of which was that I needed to make a representation of her, a painting or a doll.
 
A few days later in the tarot reading, the reader said “she may be coming through because of dark energies you are working with.” She said “she is a predator and she is looking for you, even more probably than you are looking for her,” and “she likes to take care of dirty jobs, she likes to clean things up.” She also saw several companions including a wolf, a fox and an old woman with a crow and owl companion. I’ve been working with the Morrigan energy ever since that vision and reading, in meditations and writings. 
 
Side note: I haven’t yet made a large representation of the Morrigan. Sometimes people ask me when they visit my studio, how I make my dolls. Where do my ideas come from and how long does it take to make them? Well, this is an example of why it can take a long time. I may have a vision or a strong inclination to make a certain doll but it takes a while for me to be able to come to a place of being able to bring it into reality. The dreaming and mulling sometimes is the part that takes the longest. However, I did make a small Morrigan doll for my Wheel of the Year that hangs in my meditation area. I think I have shown her in my newsletter before. 

The Morrigan, Black walnut headed doll, from my Wheel of the Year

​If you have been paying any attention to some of the feminist retellings of ancient stories of  “monsters” in mythology, religion, folk or fairy tales, you probably know that there is more awareness of how these figures have been distorted by a “patriarchal” culture. Women writers in all the above areas are revisiting stories such as the Medusa story*, (see link below) to reclaim the complexity of her nature from a reductionist description of her as an evil monster.  
​*www.byarcadia.org/post/off-with-her-head-medusa-and-feminism
Fear of the unfamiliar and strange
And these don’t have to necessarily be only feminine “monsters.” It has more to do with the common reaction to anything dark, unfamiliar and strange. The Yeti tends to be seen as masculine, though who knows? I’ve been interested in transforming what often get identified as monsters into something much more complex, and perhaps even helpful. This curiosity comes up in my Befriending Our Shadow course and to my Tending Your Inner Garden course. In the first, it is getting to know our own nature from dark to light and in the second it is getting to know the cycles of nature. I’m searching for to an acceptance of nature (inner and outer) in all its manifestations, from the fiercest to the gentlest.  

Deep Forest Guide, Maker of Spells in reviewing the dolls I made last year,. A variation on the Morrigan theme. This one sold at the Jackson Art Center, Spring Open Studios 2023.

As always, I learned so much from writing this. I hope you might have been inspired as well. This is probably the first in a series of articles on this topic. Thanks for reading.